Here's to stuff!!

Roots in the Sky has been active since March of '09, and I've written a measly 15 posts. 

Sorry, friends. 

If I'm going to keep a blog, I might as well use it, right?

Let's get to it.

I guess if you're reading this, you probably want to know a little bit about what I'm doing with my life, right? Glad you asked!

Getting to record with Julia is seriously one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do, ever. I feel a huge sense of responsibility to get things sounding as good on the album as they do in our little studio. She'll seriously just nail her vocal takes, like, within the first ten tries. Simon could attest to the significance and probability of that, at least in lesser musicians like myself. So far, the tracks sound a little rough at the edges, and it's totally my fault, so I need to figure out how to clean them up. I wish I had more time, I want to explore sounds, percussion, etc. so that this record will sound amazing. She deserves that. I'm going to try.

A huge bonus to setting up the studio and recording with Julia is that I've also started recording my Dad's music, which is something we've wanted to do for a looooong time. I wish you could all hear his songs right now. Someday you will. I need to get that project moving as well.

Matteo's first show went really well. I think we all felt like we had something great going on during our rehearsals, but it's different when it really comes together in a performance and that greatness really translates to an audience. It's one of the first groups I've been in where you can really see synergy happening; the sound the group can make is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. (For those of you that don't know, Matteo is a group I'm in with Eric Chipman and his wife Brynne. Chip writes the music, sings, plays guitar. I play upright bass and guzheng. Brynne plays violin and erhu. Brynne? Brynn? Never spelled it before.)

I don't know what to call my project with James Miska... Somebody at Davey's party said we looked like brothers, so we joked that we were Don Giovanni and the Family Band. Camillo (our drummer) is obviously a second cousin of some sort. That project is really something else. The song we put together is a strange mishmash of parts that James and I wrote, but it works really well. I'm excited to see what happens when we record it, and I'm also excited to see what happens down the road with this new musical connection. I've said this to a lot of people, but I really feel like I'm sitting at the big kids' table when I'm with him and his friends, so it's fun to feel like he respects me musically.

Keileigh and I are figuring ourselves out. It's surely the strangest emotional space I've ever inhabited, but the bottom line is, I really love that girl. Every single diploid cell in her multicellular organism (those are the words she used after I went on what was surely an incredibly boring rant about how cool cells are. p.s. I love my biology class 100x more than I expected to.)

I have probably 4 or 5 half-written songs that I'm trying to finish. I wrote another verse to one I posted on here a while ago, and in the spirit of full disclosure, it's almost entirely lifted fragments from Paradise Lost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Bible:

Liquid light on the porous globe is tabula rasa

Clarity is useful now that I’m prone to wander

The humble shrub is last in line, and I on painted wings

Crumple, buckle, wonder, as the effervescent sing

But who wants to hear about MY music? Puh-leeze. Boring.

Here's a few musicians I've been into lately:

Esperanza Spalding. Good God, where did this lady come from? Thanks to Kimberlee for finding her. Just, no words at all for this. I dare you not to be captivated. (this video has a long intro, so unless you want to hear David Letterman talk about something or other, skip to 0:40)

Florence and the Machine. I think I'm pretty late on the bandwagon with these guys, their youtube videos have like millions of hits and stuff. I was given their new album by a friend. In spite of their apparent popularity, their music videos are really awful, like, almost to the point of ruining the music for me. So I'll just link to some music. The whole "Lungs" album is fantastic though.

And finally, here's a group I really can't get over. Pomplamoose. They're a boyfriend/girlfriend duo based out of Portland, and not only are they hilarious (check the end of every video), wonderful arrangers, and talented multi-instrumentalists, but I think Nataly (the girl singer) is completely gorgeous. Crush. So.. yep.

They do plenty of covers, but their original stuff is great too. Check out Le Commun des Mortels. 

EDIT: Blogger was cutting off the side of the Pomplamoose video when I tried to embed it, so just go here. Now!

School is impossibly great right now. Really really busy, but pretty wonderful.

Hopefully now I can post some smaller, more manageable stuff and not feel like I'm leaving anything out. 

Here's to stuff!!

Luke